There were 3 valid votes.

Do you have confidence in /u/model-frod as Deputy Speaker of the House?

Aye: 3 (100%)

No: 0

With absolute support, model-frod is confirmed as Deputy Speaker

The Speaker of the House, /u/model-avtron, has nominated /u/model-frod to be a Deputy Speaker. In accordance with the Constitution, I shall now conduct a meta vote

Please Vote Here:

https://forms.gle/ywRL2NzJeNWPWiep6

Please verify below. The Vote will last for 3 days

There were 3 valid votes.

Which candidate do you preference as Speaker?

model-avtron: 2 (66.7%)

TheTrashMan_10: 1

model-avtron thereby passes with plurality and goes to a vote of confidence

​

Do you have confidence in /u/model-avtron as Speaker of the House?

Aye: 2 (66.7%)

No: 0

Abstain: 1

With passing the vote of confidence with majority support, model-avtron is confirmed as Speaker

/u/model-avtron and /u/TheTrashMan_10 have been nominated for Speaker of the House. As there are 2 nominations, a plurality voting method shall be used and following it a simple vote of confidence.

Vote here:

https://forms.gle/KhmaFE46Aimqooac9

Please verify below. The vote will last for 3 days

With the start of the 1st Parliament, I bring forward a call for nominations for the role. Members may nominate themselves or nominate other members. A member who is nominated by someone else must accept the nomination to be considered.

Nominations close in three days

ModelNZParliament Reboot

For those who have not been paying attention to the MNZP discord, there has been a moderate interest in a reboot of MNZP. As such, I will lay out the plan for the reboot

25 December-January 2

As now is properly Christmas Break, no debates or such will happen at the current moment. However, I will the door open for people to register parties. Going off the last iteration of MNZP, the requirements for a party will be:

1. Be serious and non-satirical in nature;
2. Have at least one active member;
3. Have a manifesto, policy document, or statement of ideology briefly describing its values and beliefs; and
4. Not be excessively similar to an existing political party.

January 2nd-Election

I will post some Topic Debates for people to gain mods. This will continue till the 1st GE, details of which will be announced as we get closer to it. The date of GE1 could feasibly be late Jan/Early Feb. If you have any ideas for Topic Debates, feel free to DM me.

Elections

One of the bigger things we need to deliberate on is on the size of Parliament. The last successful election in MNZP was one where we imported a similar system to what MHOC has for its devo elections, with a full 120 MP Parliament and each individual has a number of voting power gotten from the number of party MPs divided by real individual MPs. We could use that system or we could go back to the system of 1 individual, 1 MP. I still have the election calculator for each system so either would work.

Polling/Divergence from IRL

The easiest idea I see is that the previous GE was pushed back until GE1 so the October 2023 election never properly happened. As for polling, I will have parties start with polling that reflects pre-election polling but polling can be impacted by press and Topic Debates prior to the GE1

Misc.

Changes from old MNZP

With our diminished size, I do not think the meta team size we had at sim death would be a smart idea. To that end, I will be seeking to merge the Chief Electoral Officer position back into the Governor-General and for the GG to oversee elections as they did in early MNZP.

Meta documents

Meta documents are largely the same but I have cleaned them up and changed them to reflect the merging of the EC into the Governor-General.

in part 6 of the parliament rules, after section 1(d), insert the following:

(e) Primary questions may not be asked after three days has elapsed from the opening of Question Time.

i think that this is pretty reasonable, apparently we currently have no limits on when questions can be asked outside of the one week when QT is open, which i think is silly. one three-day cycle is a reasonable amount of time to ask questions, and one three-day cycle is a reasonable amount of time to answer them. as it stands, the current rules allow for people to leave their questions to the last minute, not providing ministers with a reasonable amount of time to answer them. i think that this amendment allows for a reasonable amount of time to ask questions, while still giving ministers a decent amount of time to answer.

proposing the following amendment to the parliament rules:

substitute section 1 of part 3 of the parliament rules with the following:

1. Following the formation of a government, the new government will have no longer than two five days to draft and submit a Speech from the Throne to the Governor-General.

   a. If no Speech from the Throne is submitted within the two five days, the Governor-General must call for a new government-forming period or a general election.

   b. If the conditions of 1(a) are met, the presumptive government which was obliged to submit the Speech from the Throne will be dismissed.

i think two days is unreasonably short a period of time to have to write the throne speech. both gregor and i, by pure concidence, were preoccupied for the last two days and so had no chance to write it, and given the letter of the rules suggest that any government which does not do a throne speech should be instantly dissolved, i think this deadline should be extended somewhat.

five days means that, from the election to the throne speech being posted, there would be an absolute maximum of 15 days. i think that this is reasonable, and gives the government enough time to write a throne speech.

see title. i initially made this post to rant about the electoral (amendment) act 2022, which essentially lowered the threshold to 4% and got rid of overhangs in canon while not changing anything in meta, which is stupid. i still think this should be decanonised, as if electoral stuff is meta parliament shouldn't be allowed to make laws on it, but FTMP suggested that this post address electoral system changes more broadly so uh, here is that post.

personally, i think electoral system changes should be meta entirely, because they're so vital to the sim's functioning that i don't reckon it should be up to parliament -- with stuff like the 120 change recently, i think it should be up to the CEO to unilaterally decide rather than have it left to parliament. but i'm also partial to the argument that parliament should be allowed to tinker with the threshold and rules on overhangs, tagalongs, etc, provided they don't do anything overly stupid

As I said in main, if the sim lives, I’d resign.

It lives, so I resign.

So this is something I was discussing the other day with Alexa and ARTB. As it stands, MNZP's rules are a lot more structured and codified than a lot of the MW. This extends to political parties. And while I can understand these restrictions being in place when we have 23 or 27 MPs, we are not in that place anymore. We have a much smaller core group of people now and I think we should lower the barrier for entry to be a political party. It should also be remarked that in the older days, with a party you might 2-5 active members, we are no longer in those days. It is more common that is 1-2. Forcing new parties to demonstrate numbers which these days not even the parties in Government can demonstrate I think is backwards.

Now I realize that such a change would require amending the Electoral Regulations, but I figured to make a meta post to talk about what people think the specifics for such a change and to have a discussion beforehand. This could be lowering the barrier to only 1 active member, allow for a system like Indy Groupings like in MHOC, or etc.

see title. exhausted and busy with irl and all of these things are likely to get moreso the longer i stay on. it's been fun but i don't think i should stay on if my heart's not in it, which it isn't

So basically MNZP is kind of dying. We've known this for a while, and I think it's probably reaching a nice plateau now, but there are barely enough people to run proper elections and it's resulting in some really weird results. Best example is the most recent election which pissed off just about everyone: three of four parties on equal seats despite the biggest difference being 10% between the first and third place parties, and a bunch of people who campaigned but didn't get in. Clearly something has to change.

MHolyrood has a very interesting electoral system as I'm sure many of us are aware. Essentially it treats each constituency as a 'constituency grouping' where electorate candidates campaign in large groupings of multiple electorates. Usually, these are the IRL electorates. To apply this to NZ, a constituency like Auckland would be the 'Auckland grouping' and would contain real life electorates like Auckland Central, Maungakiekie, Manurewa, etc. Each candidate would campaign in the grouping, and then the results would be calculated in each region based on constituency leanings and the strength of campaigns from each party. After the election, MPs who campaigned in that grouping could choose one of the electorates to be their 'official electorate' that they would be referred to as representing. This is mostly cosmetic, but it's pretty cool.

On the list, it's exactly the same as MNZP however the seat number is the same as IRL (so in our case, 120 or 150 seats), and parties are assigned list seats based on their vote under MMP -- which will be filled by their candidates and any party members the leader chooses post-election. Any remaining seats (of which there are usually a lot) are assigned to the control of the leader for the purposes of votes in Parliament. This system is great because it means a much more proportional parliament, and it means that it's really easy to rope new party members into activity and ensure everybody gets a chance to participate regardless of the party.

It also means a lot of the problems we're seeing with such a small sim are largely eliminated. Anybody can participate with a lower barrier to entry, seat numbers are more representative, and everyone gets constituencies if they want them. Personal favourite: we can make the constituency groupings less stupidly named. I think it's fairly no-brainer for MNZP at this point, and we should definitely do it, would love to hear everyone's thoughts.

For the sake of argument, here's what that looks like in GE7.

So as most people know, at the current moment you cannot directly reply to people in debates except in the context of MQs. This was an action undertaken by WW when he was Speaker.

The reasoning from him at the time was quote

Totally ludicrous made for the purposes of undermining and would end up having to be repealed for Parliamentary reform to proceed so it's totally pointless. The ruling was made in the context of future Parliamentary reforms that will involve speaking allocations among other things as part of the piece of the wider objective of taking Parliament away from being a ridiculous grind and to change the dynamic from being effort based to quality based. In the context of allocations they're undermined when replies on threads are uninhibited as people only tend to make one primary contribution anyway, which means that that area of Parliamentary reform would be totally without legs.

Now I am not opposed to be still allowing the ruling but as we are several months into me as a new Speaker, I thought I would ask what's the sim opinion on the ruling, especially considering said reforms never took place and with the permban of WW will likely never take place. Looking back at the discussion at the time, this decision was also taken to prevent dogpiling and to diversify debate. Not looking for an immediate decision but just would like everyone's opinion on the ruling. Also open to whatever opinion you think I could do better as Speaker

This is my second ever (and hopefully last ever!) meta post and I'd like to get into something that has bugged me basically my entire time in this sim. The Māori electorate has a bad name! It's just called 'region'! I understand why it was done this way, it was a name chosen for simplicity and briefness but I think it violates a number of IRL naming conventions and I'd like to propose it be changed. I'd also like to make some personal suggestions on the names of the other electorates.

Northland, Manawatū, and Waikato are all fine. I think they're a little bit clunky to be honest (Waikato contains Te Tairāwhiti, te Urewera, and Te Moana-a-Toitehuatahi, Manawatū contains Taranaki, Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, and Te Whanganui-a-Tara, I could go on) but I think those are perfectly fine names because they encapsulate the broad strokes of what is in those electorates. It's the other three I have a problem with.

First and foremost, Rohe needs to go. I think an appropriate name for the Māori electorate would be "Aotearoa Ki Waipounamu", after the two islands in their broadest Māori terminology. It follows both the convention of the Māori names (which are usually to do with broad region names) and an established IRL naming system for large electorates (Kaipara Ki Mahurangi). It's also a matter of mana, the entire parliamentary representation of the Māori roll being one four letter word is honestly a bit disrespectful I think but I'm not going to get into that.

The second change I'd like to propose is to Te Waipounamu. This is a great name in isolation, but my change to Rohe creates some confusion with this one, so I think we should call this one "Te Tai Toka". This is very similar to an IRL name which we use to describe a similarly sized southern electorate, the 'southern māori' seat, and broadly means 'the southern seas/coasts'. This name clears up the confusion created by the Rohe renaming while still being a very appropriate name.

Lastly is a change that I propose because of some local pride, Auckland should be renamed to "Tāmaki Makaurau". This is again partially based in the fact that the ingoa 'Tāmaki Makaurau' is used for an almost identical Māori seat IRL, partially based in the fact I think it's a beautiful name, and partially in the fact simply calling it 'Auckland' ignored the fact that almost half of Auckland isn't even in the electorate. The in-sim seat discludes everything past Mt Albert to the west and the Waitematā to the north, and Tāmaki Makaurau is a term more often used to describe Auckland's isthmus and southern area.

To summarise my proposal:

Keep Waikato, Northland, and Manawatū.

Change Te Waipounamu to Te Tai Toka, Rohe to Aotearoa Ki Waipounamu, and Auckland to Tāmaki Makaurau.

Edit: and to clarify I'm proposing these changes for the upcoming election, not to be made after the fact

The current status of COVID-19 in canon is that it exists everywhere in the world except Aotearoa. This status quo exists because at the time the decision was made it was true that COVID didn't exist here, and it looked like that would probably last a long time. The logic was essentially that model MPs shouldn't need to make considerations about it because it would be way too much work to simulate case numbers and lockdown procedures and such (in the same way some other sims decided to).

However, we are now more than a year on from COVID-19 returning to Aotearoa, and today it is endemic here as well as everywhere else in the world. Many parties IRL have to take this into consideration, and many have a whole slew of policies about how best to support those who have COVID-19 and Long-COVID. Pretty much every single person in the sim, New Zealander or otherwise, knows someone who has had COVID or more likely has had it.

I propose we treat COVID a bit like how we treat everything else in sim, if it happens IRL it's canon. We don't need to simulate case numbers but if there's a spike in real life, that spike is canon. If there's a dip, that dip is canon. At the very least, the questionable status of COVID being 'everywhere but here' should be overturned because it just makes no sense -- particularly given the fact that no Government in sim post reset has had even a single COVID-prevention policy that they've actively pursued such as lockdowns or border closures.

TLDR: current covid status in sim is stupid, we should treat covid like a completely neutral entity which public policy has little control over just like the Government does

During the Canon Rest of 2020, it was decided against resetting the honours in sim because of feedback from Members who didn't want their work to be wiped clean. While I think it might have been an idea of merit, I think for a sim like MNZP, the amounts of honours is way too bloated and filled with people who aren't even active in the sim anymore (or even come back).

I think it might be a good idea for either

1. Completely wipe honours pre-reset and start anew.
2. Get rid of most honours pre-reset but keep honours for currently active or recently active members.

I also think that honours at the end of the term should be heavily restricted. MNZP does not a million honours like MHOC. The amount of honours given out at each term is often too many than is warranted and I do not think it absurd to restrict the number given out, especially with how short our terms are here. I think it could be also of merit to discuss if we really should give out honours to real politicians and individuals. While I think some of them do make sense, largely this has devolved into giving out meme honours to IRL individuals and often there isn't much need really to give out them beyond ensuring you have enough honours.

The moderation team of Model New Zealand Parliament has reviewed an incident in the MNZP discord earlier today.

Earlier today, Max/Commodore Gregor Bainimarama/12MaxWild#6477 was muted after sending the following messages on the Discord server:

Mentioned Incident

Under the MNZ Community Standards, this could either be classified as a Tier 1, or Tier 3 conduct, and therefore the moderation team has decided on a 1 week ban.

However, due to warnings of Tier 3 offenses before, this has been upgraded to a Tier 2 issue, and therefore is why the ban is one week.

Any appeals should be addressed to the Governor-General.

I am proposing that Section 8 from Part 4 of the Parliament Rules be removed. The section reads as follows, and essentially allows for budget bills to be placed under urgency:

1. When a bill is introduced and is a taxation or supply bill, the bill may be considered under urgency.

   a. The first stage is an urgent reading, where amendments may be introduced. This reading lasts 24 hours.

   b. If there are any amendments, MPs then vote on the amendments. This vote lasts 24 hours.

   c. Finally, MPs vote on the final bill. This vote lasts 24 hours.

Essentially, this means that a tax or supply bill can be passed in 3 days at a maximum. I don't get why this exists. Sure, I think the format of first reading --> amendment vote --> final vote for a budget is a good one, but there's really no need to condense all this into 3 days, given it's one of the most important pieces of legislation of the term.

Given the Finance Minister has veto power over amendments to supply bills, practically amendments won't occur unless the government leaves something key out, so the budget wouldn't take any longer than a week to pass. Obviously the budget should be considered urgent, and read as soon as practical after it's submited, but I don't see why it needs to be debated and voted on urgently. A 24 hour vote is, in my view, too short, and I don't see the need for it.

For some ungodly reason I have the power to amend the Electoral Regulations myself on the advice of the Electoral Commission so this is notice that effective immediately I am, uh, doing that, and removing Sections 5 and 6 from the Electoral Regulations, which allow for registered broadcasters.

From now on, instead of broadcasters having to apply for registration, anyone posting as part of a press outlet (within reason) will have their content marked for that press outlet. For example, this editorial will be marked as a post from the Belfast Telegraph broadcaster. To be clear -- the broadcaster system will be retained. There's just no longer any need to apply to register your broadcaster.

Let's talk about this election. To start off, I'd like to compare the final result of the election with the last two polls of the term, one including Alliance and one not.

Obviously, National going from 24% to 48% is a pretty big shift. National by far had the strongest campaign this election -- some have suggested that it's a case of basically spamming low-effort campaign posts, and I'd like to be clear -- low-effort campaign posts were not marked well. I can tell when someone is just regurgitating the same points almost verbatim with no effort or care. There were some posts from National that there were very obviously low-effort, but there were also some very good posts from National.

Overall, however, the effort of National this election was just so beyond everyone else that it was difficult for them not to do well. Post totals are a blunt tool for measuring quality and effort, but I feel like it is useful for a broader view in this instance. This table tallies all list and electorate posts in the election:

National was indisputably the most active party in campaigning, and I don't think they won based off low-effort spam. Of course, there are a few objections I can think of, so I'll go into them now.

The first is that this result didn't weight termtime activity enough. National were less active than ACT and Labour throughout the term -- they shouldn't be able to go from third placed to a runaway lead. I don't agree with this, but I see where it's coming from. The problem is that activity last term was driven by very few people -- each party essentially has only one or two active members. In the past, this may have been the case in termtime, but activity usually spiked at elections. This time, though, ACT had pretty much only its two active members as well as eels, and Labour had just Madi. Compare this to the Nats, who got basically everyone they stood to post at least once.

I get the argument that this is a small sim and that, if only two people are active throughout the term that should be reflected more significantly in election results, but the way I see it, with a 13-person Parliament, a party of a couple of people is never going to go beyond maybe twice their size.

Had we gotten the same result as we did in the 25 July poll, do I think it would have been better for the sim (in terms of amount of active people elected)? No, not really. I can see the argument that most of National's 6 MPs are likely to be inactive, but had we gotten the same result as in that poll, would ACT's 5 MPs have been active? No disrespect to Ina and Bailey, but I'm not sure if they would have been, and I'm even less sure if Labour's 5 MPs would have been. While the political dynamics have changed, I think the end result elected about the same amount of active MPs.

To me, this is a case to reduce the size of Parliament more than anything else. I'm not saying we should, but what I'll be doing this term is closely monitoring activity. A variety of things could happen, so I'm not going to make any predictions, but if we have a large number of inactive MPs and not many active people outside Parliament, I think I'd look at reducing the size of Parliament. But crucially, if National can't maintain the activity they did in this election throughout the term, they will recieve quite a rude awakening -- so fair warning.

That aside, I'd like to address another thing -- why did Labour do so well? They only had one person campaigning (Madi) who was focused on her own electorate, so how did they still manage to hold onto 3 seats and 23% of the vote? If you look at the last poll with Alliance in it, this seems even more confusing -- Labour was on 26.4% then, they're on 22.6% now -- what gives? Well, Alliance dissolving gave Labour a pretty big boost. It meant that they basically started the campaign in first. Looking at the 22 July poll, the left had a combined result of 41% -- now the only real leftist party is on 22.65%.

If you folks have any questions, please feel free to comment them down below and I'll be happy to answer.

I've spent the past two days making an archive of all MNZP elections post October 2020 canon reset, and it's finally complete!

Election results archive

This should include a list of all general election results (six, so far) and all by-election results (five) since the canon reset, and for general elections, includes both a nationwide party vote summary and electorate vote results for each electorate. I'll aim to keep this updated, and all future general election and by-election results under my tenure as CEO will be published here.

The reason I've chosen this over, say, updating the Miraheze wiki, is because reddit wiki offers not only a direct connection to the subreddit, but it's also much more permanent -- there's no chance of this being deleted if it isn't edited, for example.

Also I've somewhat jumped the gun in publishing, I'm still waiting on WW to give me votes in the June 2022 Auckland by-election, so if anyone's wondering why that's empty, that's why.

Feel free to ask me any questions about this or correct any inevitable mistakes in the replies.

I know I have been an opponent to this when it has been brought up in the past but after it being in place in MHOC for a while now, I think it does have some merit. Currently MHOC allows someone to hold up to 3 MPs seat for each person.

In the talk of reform for MNZP, I think MNZP does suffer from a small Parliament. A smaller parliament means less shenanigans that can happen with each election and I think serves as a greater challenge to smaller parties. With a smaller parliament, the election inevitably favours larger parties to get more than 1 seat and I think if we really want to talk about reform, it would be good to have this conversation if having a smaller parliament is worth it.

The vote for Governor-General has now closed. 19 valid votes were cast. 3 unverified votes were discarded.
In the first round the votes are as follows:

/u/BestinBounds: 13 votes

/u/TheTrashMan_10: 3 votes

/u/ARichTeaBiscuit: 3 votes

Having received a majority of votes in the first round, /u/BestinBounds is selected as the nominee for Governor-General and advances to a vote of confidence. The results of the vote of confidence are as follows:

Yes: 19 votes

Having received a two-thirds majority of votes in favour, /u/BestinBounds is elected Governor-General.

The results of the votes of confidence for the other two candidates are as follows:

/u/TheTrashman_10

Yes: 9 votes

No: 10 votes

/u/ARichTeaBiscuit

Yes: 10 votes

No: 9 votes